OUR OBLIGATIONS TO GREEK THOUGHT. 241 
Kosmos,—Democritus, the expounder of his master, Leucippus, 
appears to have arrived, in his last analysis of organised and 
unorganised bodies, at ultimate atoms devoid of all quality, but 
varying in size and weight; and basing his conclusions, with 
respect to cause of combination and quality, upon an exclusive 
regard to power objective to mind, he postulated, in place of the 
eternal vous of his predecessor, an invisible mysterious energy, or 
bare Force, which he designated dvayxy—the possibility of its effect- 
ing motion being accounted for by the presence between the atoms 
of vacuum, 76 Kevov. 
It is only necessary to state these few particulars in order to be 
reminded of a later Lucretian development of them, which in its 
turn has been the progenitor of a cosmological system held in high 
repute by a distinguished modern school. Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
urged by that rigorous logic of which he is so able a master, 
evidently sees that he must, by the very conception of Evolution as 
a getting of all differentiation out of what is undifferentiated, trace 
all things back to an ultimate in which no quality is found. 
Modern atomists enjoy advantages in the results of analytic 
chemistry, and greater precision of terms; but the conclusion is 
emphatically Democritan ; and probably, under logical pressure, it 
will still be held by some philosophers, in face even of the 
enormous physical and metaphysical difficulties which other more 
wary natures perceive in obtaining—from the bare surface contact 
of two immutable things, devoid of quality, and by the action on 
them of a purely mechanical force, which itself parts with no 
quality—an actual quality which shall possess within itself a 
capacity for the further creation of difference. 
In estimating the connection between modern and ancient 
conclusions, it behoves us to avoid the fallacy of confounding co- 
incidences with derivation; and we should be careful to abstain 
from the delusive habit of importing into the terms and propositions 
of one age the ideas of another. ‘‘Great minds think alike,” 
as we say in pleasantry; and we are apt to see our theories 
every where. 
But anyone who attends to the historical transmission of the 
great problems relating to the origin of the world, noticing, as 
he must, how every powerful thinker has referred to previous 
attempts at solution, will see at once that our modern cosmogonies 
are not independent and original, but essentially an exposition 
